MMAR 2024 plenary lecturers

Emilia Fridman Tel Aviv University, Israel Using Delay for Control

Maciej Michałek Poznan University of Technology, Poland Kinematics and Control of Articulated Vehicles

Predrag Stanimirović University of Niś , Serbia Application of recurrent neural networks and generalized inverses in optimization and design of perfect minimum energy control

Ming Cao University of Groningen, The Netherlands Navigation of cooperative robotic teams

Emilia Fridman

Emilia Fridman received the M.Sc and Ph.D in mathematics in Russia. Since 1993 she has been at Tel Aviv University, where she is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering – Systems. She has held numerous visiting positions in Europe, China and Australia. Her research interests include time-delay systems, networked control systems, distributed parameter systems, robust control and extremum seeking. She has published more than 200 journal articles and 2 monographs. She serves/served as Associate Editor in Automatica, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization and IMA Journal of Mathematical Control and Information. She is IEEE Fellow and was a member of the IFAC Council. In 2014 she was ranked as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson ISI. Since 2018, she has been the incumbent for Chana and Heinrich Manderman Chair on System Control at Tel Aviv University. In 2021 she was recipient of IFAC Delay Systems Life Time Achievement Award and of Kadar Award for outstanding research in Tel Aviv University. She is currently IEEE CSS Distinguished Lecturer. In 2023 her monograph “Introduction to Time-Delay Systems: Analysis and Control” (Birkhauser, 2014) was the winner of IFAC Harold Chestnut Control Engineering Textbook Prize.

Maciej Michałek

Maciej Marcin Michałek received the Ph.D. and D.Sc. (Habilitation) degrees in the field of automatic control and robotics from the Poznan University of Technology (PUT), Poznań, Poland, in years 2006, and 2015, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Institute of Automatic Control and Robotics of PUT. His research interests include modeling and control-design problems for nonholonomic systems, especially for mobile robots, N-trailer structures, and intelligent/automated vehicles. Dr. Michałek is a Senior Member of IEEE; he served as a Chair for the Polish Chapter of IEEE Robotics & Automation Society in cadences 2020-2021 and 2022-2023. He was an editorial board member of the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems in years 2011-2023 and the Journal of the Franklin Institute in years 2020-2022. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Cybernetics and IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

Predrag Stanimirović

Predrag S. Stanimirović has accomplished his Ph.D.in Computer Science at University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy, Niš, Serbia. He is a full Professor at University of Niš, Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics, Departments of Computer Science, Niš, Serbia. He acquired thirty-six years of experience in scientific research in diverse fields of mathematics and computer science, which span multiple branches of numerical linear algebra, recurrent neural networks, linear algebra, nonlinear optimization, symbolic computation and others. His main research topics include Numerical Linear Algebra, Operations Research, Recurrent Neural Networks and Symbolic Computation. He has published over 300 publications in scientific journals, including 5 research monographs, 6 text-books, and over 80 peer-reviewed research articles published in conference proceedings and book chapters. He was editorial board member of more than 20 scientific journals, 5 of which belong to Journal Citation Report (JCR) list. Currently, he is section editor of the scientific journals Electronic Research Archive (ERA), Filomat, Facta Universitatis, Series: Mathematics and Informatics and several other journals. He is the author in the World Rank List of 2% best authors in 2021 and 2022.

Ming Cao

Ming Cao has since 2016 been a chair professor of networks and robotics with the Engineering and Technology Institute (ENTEG) at the University of Groningen. Since 2022 he is the director of the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI at the same university. He received the Ph.D. degree in 2007 from Yale University, USA. From 2007 to 2008, he was a Research Associate at Princeton University, USA. He is the 2017 and inaugural recipient of the Manfred Thoma medal from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and the 2016 recipient of the European Control Award sponsored by the European Control Association (EUCA). He is a recipient of a number of prestigious personal research grants, including the Dutch Vici grant and the ERC consolidator and starting grants. He is an IEEE fellow and a member of the IFAC Council. His research interests include autonomous robots and multi-agent systems, complex networks and decision-making processes.